Saturday, September 5, 2009

Well, as you recall from yesterday’s blog, our hero (Mr. Sister) has just become the self-proclaimed greatest Husband and Father ever! Things were looking up and I haven’t even set up the program (and remember, I’ve not confirmed that the Ebay capture card works). What could go wrong?? I’ve bested the video capture problem, I slayed the dreaded hard drive problem! I’m on cloud 9!So, triumphantly, I download the documentation (a 287 page guide on how to set up and configure SageTV) and start setting up the program. Change the firewall settings on my server and my router, check. Establish SageTV as a service, check. Now, the steps start to get more complex. On the service setup screen, it asked for the user name and password for the account with Administrative privileges. Well, my default signon HAS administrative privileges – use that! Enter password – I did not set up a password for my default signon! Password NOT ENTERED! Please re-enter your password! WHAT? I don’t HAVE a password… Password NOT ENTERED! Please re-enter your password! Oh, now, this is GREAT! I have to set up an Administrative account with a Password, just to install this service?!?! Some programmer is probably snickering in the background (more likely, this was a test script error!). The setup continues, “Do you want to set up Placeshifter?” What? Ok, Use UPnP? Ok, I know what UPnP is, but some of the Weekend Warrior hacks may not (stands for Universal Plug and Play – on the router, not through Windows which also has UPnP)! Where is your decoder? WHAT??? Now, even I don’t know what is a decoder (The manual describes it as follows:

MPEG2 Video Decoder FilterA pop-up menu lists all the available video decoders, which are used to decode the MPEG2-formatted video data. The list of decoders depends on the MPEG-2 decoders that are installed onyour PC related to your video card, DVD player and TV tuner/Capture card. Select the videodecoder that you would like SageTV to use for MPEG-2 video playback.Note: If you are using the Sigma Designs Xcard as your video decoder, select it from the list andset the Video Renderer to default. Also confirm that the Audio Renderer and MPEG2 AudioDecoder Filter are set to default as well.

) Ok, I have multiple decoders installed! Which one is the best? I’ll pass on this, maybe it will default correctly. I ended up passing on a lot of selections because they just didn’t make sense.Next was configuring the source. Each TV receiver had to be configured separately. Matching the source up with the cable channels from the provider, but guess what? They didn’t have a configuration for our area! So, I filled out a support request which went unanswered. I posted the question to the forum, which also went unanswered. So, I configured them manually. Okay, remember that board I purchased from Ebay? Out of two standard input, I could only get 1 configured (down to two TV cable inputs).Now comes the moment of truth! My end-game is now within reach! It is time to start the program for the first time! And… Stay tuned for tomorrow’s episode entitled:Do you find “Java Heaps” in Star Bucks?